Language speaks through us as the origin of speech, but it also speaks through us as the death of speech. It speaks as the moment in which the purposeful agency of speech is finally called into question and in a certain sense undermined. I think it’s appropriate to call language – again, metaphorically – the epitaph of speech, the way in which in any given speech the end of its own agency is inscribed even as that agency is going forward.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that’s absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

I knew that to be human was to be inadequate, to fail, to never be good enough. Everywhere weaknesses, everywhere flaws, which often hardened into self-righteousness. If there was one consistent character trait I saw in people, it was self-righteousness, conceit, smugness. Humility, that word that everyone in the public sphere was always tossing off, was something hardly anyone knew the meaning of anymore.

As a small boy, whenever I saw myself reflected in a large mirror, I felt all the horror of the wraith-like doubling or multiplication of reality. Mirrors, with their never-failing mimicry, their pursuit of each of my movements, their pantomime of the world, seemed eerie to me. If a mirror hangs in a room, I can no longer be alone there: someone else is present. God created the forms of the mirror to show man that he is but a reflection, that all is vanity; this is why mirrors frighten us.

For years and years I thought about the light through the window, the light through the shutters. It seemed a pity not to reveal how it was. That light and the noises of the city outside. Although I was in complete privacy, no one in the street knew I was there. I was in bed with a man, my lover, yet at the same time I was also in the street. It felt like being in front of an audience. I was in public but at the same time totally private, completely hidden. I saw the street, but they didn’t know I was there. It’s a bit like the process of writing. The writer’s viewpoint is lost and taken over by the work itself.

When I was with her, it was as though something was sucked out of me. The dark got brighter, the stunted straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn’t come from the outside, it wasn’t that she lit up the dark, no, it was something that happened in me, because I saw myself with her eyes and not just my own, and in her eyes there wasn’t anything wrong with me, on the contrary. That was how the balance changed. When I was with Gunvor, I no longer wanted to do harm to myself.

The university was a new beginning. More than that, it was something to hold on to. The lectures were fixed points, as were the reading room and the books. No matter what happened, no matter how miserable I was, I could always go up to the reading room and find a place and sit there reading as long as I wanted to, nobody could object to that, nobody could think that was strange, after all that was the essence of university life. I bought a two-volume survey of world literature and ploughed through it author by author, from Homer to the sixties, tried to remember a line or two from each of them, what they wrote. I went to the lectures, Kittang on the poetry of antiquity, Buvik on the epics of antiquity, Linneberg on the drama of antiquity. Among all the names and years, some turbulent insights emerged. Odysseus who tricked the Cyclops by saying his name was ‘no one’. He lost himself but gained life. The song of the sirens. Those who heard it also lost themselves, were drawn towards them, did everything in their power to get close to them, and died. The sirens were both Eros and Thanatos, desire and death, the most desirable and the most dangerous. Orpheus, who sang so beautifully that all who heard it were spellbound and lost themselves, he who went down into the kingdom of death to bring back Eurydice, and who would have succeeded had he only not turned around and looked at her, but he did, and lost her forever. A French philosopher named Blanchot had written about it, and I read his essay about Orpheus, which said that art was a power that made the night open itself, but that it’s Eurydice he wants, and that she was the highest that art could achieve. Eurydice was the other night, wrote Blanchot.

These thoughts were too big for me, but I was drawn to them and tried to think them through, master them, make them mine, without succeeding, I saw them from the outside and knew that their full significance escaped me. Give the sacred back to the sacred? The night of the night? I recognised the main image, what appears and disappears in the same moment, or the simultaneous presence of one thing and another that negates the first, this was an image I’d seen in many contemporary poems, and I also got a special rush from the thoughts about the night, the other night and death, but as soon as I tried to think about them independently, in other words, step outside the form in which the thoughts were presented, it all got banal and stupid. It was like mountain climbing, you had to put your foot exactly here or there, had to grip exactly this or that with your hand, otherwise you either stayed in the same place or lost your grip and tumbled into the abyss.

The highest is what disappears when it is seen or understood. That was the core of the myth about Orpheus. But what does *that* mean?

When I sat in the reading room, which was old and oozed obscurity, and read Blanchot in the afternoon, a brand-new feeling arose in me, something I’d never felt before, an enormous overexcitement, as if I was very close to something exceptional, mixed with an equally enormous impatience, I *had* to get there, and the two feelings were so contradictory that I both wanted to stand up and run around shouting and sit quite still and read on. The strange thing was that I became so restless when I read something good which I understood and absorbed that I could hardly bear it. Often I got up and took a break, and as I walked through the corridors and up the stairs to the second floor of the canteen, my overexcitement and impatience mingled with the mocking mouth in my mind, the one that reminded me I was going to the canteen alone, and in this wild and inexplicable state of inner uproar, I bought a cup of coffee, sat down at a table and tried to look as calm as possible.

The will to acquire knowledge also had something panicky about it, in sudden and frightening insights I understood that actually I didn’t know anything, and that it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this speed to the slowness that reading demanded.

In January 1922, as Kafka was embarking on the composition of The Castle, he arrived one snowy evening in the health resort of Spindelmühle in the Riesengebirge near the Polish border. At the Hotel Krone, where he was expected, he found he was listed in the hotel directory as ‘Dr Josef Kafka’.